1. How do I participate? Join Twitter. Pick a Twitter client that works well for you in a fast paced conversation communities where hundreds of tweets will be posted in an hour. Search Twitter using the #hcsm hashtag. Review the conversations during a prior week to get a sense of how the process works. The #hcsm community meets for one hour on Sunday nights at 9pm eastern US time. #hcsm is an abbreviation for the Healthcare Communications & Social Media Twitter conversation community. The conversation community covers a range of topics that are related to communication, marketing and media issues facing healthcare organizations. The topics are not limited to how social media is used in healthcare. If you want to have your tweets, retweets and favorites used by the conversation community in the follow-on transcripts, you need to follow @healthsocmed on Twitter and use the #hcsm hashtag during the session.

 

2. What are the rules of engagement (etiquette) for the conversation community events? Introduce yourself with a brief tweet when the moderator (who uses the Twitter name @healthsocmed) asks for introductions. Introductions generally go on for 3-5 minutes. If you arrive late, start with an introduction. The moderator (@danamlewis is the regular moderator and founder of #hcsm) will then list topics for discussion. The moderator will decide when it is time to move to a new topic. (Note: #hcsm is not a multi-level marketing, job, recruiting, product or service promotion forum. Currently there is no time reserved for "pitches" of any kind. Hashtag or retweet spam is not tolerated and will be reported to @spam at Twitter.) The moderator will ask for final thoughts during the last 5 minutes.

 

3. How are topics selected for #hcsm events? Submit topics to @healthsocmed (replies or direct messages.) The moderator chooses the topics for each conversation community event. To get an idea of how the conversation goes, check out the transcripts, summaries and resource materials at http://hcsm.blokcast.net

 

4. Who participates in #hcsm? There is a wide range of participants including clinical, non-clinical, marketing, IT, public information and development staff from providers, payors and pharma as well as patients, students, vendors, consultants and healthcare reform activists.

 

5. Where can I find out more about Healthcare Communications & Social Media (#hcsm)? 

 

Twitter: http://twitter.com/healthsocmed

Facebook: http://facebook.com/hcsm.fb

FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/healthsocmed